I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked and who's around.
At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive help, _right now_.
One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of misses the point.
As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them through their current problem, right now.
Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.
I've certainly seen plenty of other forum software that has live updates as well, so it's not unique in that regard.
(Note that I'm not bashing Spectrum here, just saying that I don't feel it's as revolutionary as I've seen it pitched to be.)
- you can only sign up by using github. This is equally nonsensical as requiring a facebook account to sign up. I have neither. But I have e-mail, so why can't I play along?
- I legitimately cannot tell what platform this is on. Is it a webapp or is it a OSX/mac only local application?
- Does it exist on mobile?
I mean this as constructive criticism and I hope that somebody related to the project/company reads this and improves the information. But from what I can see this application is locked down for those on github and who operate macs. That makes it useless to a whole lot of people.
*edited for formatting
To answer your question it's just a web app so it works on any platform. [1]
The author talked a while ago how he regretted not building it with react-native-web. [2]
(I'm not affiliated with Spectrum)
[1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum
[2] https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum
Looks really nice though, A StackOverflow/Discord hybrid is a fascinating idea--could easily be groundbreaking.